Guide to what metrics to monitor and how to ship them to Grafana Cloud

Metrics play a crucial role in observability by providing insights into a system's performance, and Grafana Cloud offers a managed service to streamline the process of monitoring these metrics. The decision on how to best ship metrics to Grafana Cloud depends on several factors, such as the source of data, familiarity with observability tools, and the scale of metrics to be monitored. Grafana Cloud supports multiple methods for shipping metrics, including HTTP Write, Agent, and Prometheus Remote Write, each suited to different user needs and technical expertise. The guide emphasizes the importance of monitoring "The Four Golden Signals"—latency, traffic, errors, and saturation—to gain meaningful insights into system performance. Once metrics are shipped to Grafana Cloud, users can leverage the Explore tool to create and visualize queries, facilitating real-time monitoring and data analysis. The platform simplifies the management of metrics by handling scaling, security, and updates, allowing users to focus on creating and managing applications without the overhead of maintaining a metrics database.